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Monday, January 25, 2010

Study with Richard McCann at Atlantic Center for the Arts

Here’s your chance to work with Richard McCann (bio below), a wonderful and generous teacher, when he’s the artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He will be in residency from May 17 through June 6, and his residency statement sounds enticing:

"I'd like to work with prose writers-whether of fiction, nonfiction, or some combination of the two-whose works derive at least in part from autobiographical sources, so that we can explore some of our common concerns, such as what it means to work from memory and what we need to do as writers in order to transform the raw material of life into stories that have the power to move others. It's my hope that in our three weeks together--bivouacked, as it were--we'll form an attentive and generous critical community, so that we can encourage one another to take the sorts of risks that allow us to grow as writers. In the mornings, we'll write a lot; for two hours each afternoon, we'll come together for workshop sessions, individual conferences, and writing exercises that are designed to carry us to places that we hadn't necessarily thought to go. Whether working in fiction or nonfiction, you should bring with you either a work-in-progress or the desire to begin something new."

More details about the Atlantic Center:

Since 1982, Atlantic Center's residency program has provided artists from all artistic disciplines with spaces to live, work, and collaborate during three-week residencies. Located just four miles from the east coast beaches of central Florida, the pine and palmetto wooded environment contains award-winning studios that include a resource library, painting, sculpture, music, dance and writers' studios, a black box theater, and digital computer lab. Each residency session includes three master artists of different disciplines. The master artists each personally select a group of associates - talented, emerging and midcareer artists - through an application process administered by ACA. During the residency, artists participate in informal sessions with their group, collaborate on projects, and work independently. The relaxed atmosphere and unstructured program provide considerable time for artistic regeneration and creation. Atlantic Center for the Arts provides housing (private room/bath with work desk), weekday meals (provided by ACA chef) and 24-hour access to shared studio space. Financial Aid is available to qualified applicants.

And you’ll have to hurry: the application postmark deadline is February 5, 2010.

More about Richard McCann: Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient.